This paper identifies the effect of neighborhood peer groups on childhood skill acquisition using observational data. We incorporate spatial peer interaction, defined as a child’s nearest geographical neighbors, into a production function of child cognitive development in Andhra Pradesh,...

We examine the e

Households in developing countries use a variety of informal mechanisms to cope with risk, including mutual support and risk-sharing. These mechanisms cannot avoid that they remain vulnerable to shocks. Public programs in the form of food aid distribution and food-for-work programs are meant to...

Most studies fail to find an impact of school inputs on outcomes such as test scores. We argue that this might be a consequence of ignoring the possibility that households respond optimally to changes in school inputs and thus obscure the real effect of such provision on cognitive achievement....

The paper focuses on a labour market dominated by a public sector where the links between pay and effort are weak, as in many developing countries. This feature is incorporated in an extension of the basic Shapiro-Stiglitz model of shirking in order to explain the coexistence of high wages (in...

With the overthrow of the Derg in 1991, some 500,000 ex-soldiers needed to be demobilized and reintegrated back into their communities. Successfully integrating such a large number of ex-soldiers is clearly important to social stability. While carefully targeted assistance is necessary,...

Assessing changes in poverty levels over time is bedevilled by problems in questionnaire design, the choice of the poverty line, the exact timing of the survey and uncertainty about the appropriate cost-of-living deflators. In this paper, we focus on testing the robustness of measured changes in...